2011-06-30

Performance improvement

One of my chemistry programs does a topological analysis of input molecules, printing a variety of information about them. It currently processes a standardized input file of about 20,000 molecules (19,944, to be precise) in about 18.5-19s. Considering the fact that the running time came down to that level from as much as 149s a few months ago, I am happy! A few key reasons for this improvement are:

I always have a temptation to use functional-style closures with collections. They suit my style of thinking. Accordingly, I wrote a custom collection – à lacontainer/vector – with several methods that take a closure. Examples include Collect (or Map), Detect (or Find), Select (or Filter) and TakeWhile. You may recollect that the no longer extant exp/iter used to provide some of those methods!

However, spurious closures are not yet getting converted into normal function calls by the Go compiler. So, the said replacements are required until the current work on escape analysis begins to yield positive results. It is rather inelegant, but has no alternative currently.

A related issue concerns inlining. As Ron Minnich remarked, sometimes manually inlining a function may produce a better result than what a set of sophisticated algorithms employed by the compiler may produce. Nevertheless, Russ Cox has confirmed that inlining is a high-priority item. So, we can expect to see some improvement in the coming months.

When both the above get addressed, I am sure that almost all Go programs stand to benefit significantly. It does depend on the kind of actual workload in the program, but a large class of programs should benefit automatically. I, for one, eagerly await that release!